12 Best Ways to find the right Vendor

If you own a business, you must be aware about the big hassle of finding a right vendor for your business. There are pages and pages of criteria you need to evaluate to find the best match. The vendor with excellent prestige in the market might not have access to your target audience. The vendor who has your target audience in his lap might not be good with logistics and a vendor with excellent logistics might have a reputation of not paying up in time affecting your cash cycles. There are so many checkboxes in selecting a right vendor, that it somehow now seems easier to find a best match on Tinder than finding a best match for your businesses’ intermediary needs.

Below are the 12 best ways to find your soul-mate vendor who would be with you through booms and through slacks.

Trusted Family or Friend:

There are pretty good chances that you got inspired to get in the industry that you’re in, because you saw someone close, prospering here.Hence you can always seek their advice. It would always be reliable as they too care about what’s best for you. But the biggest pitfall in this method is the dynamic nature of every industry. What worked for them may not work for you.

Use what you’ve always used:

If you have sustained a considerable time period in the industry, you already know and have partnered with the best vendors that are there. Hence the safest way to go is the already tested way. Although as the common norm goes; high risk pays high returns and safer options give out modest returns. As the needs of you audience change, there might be a possibility that you would have to give up the current vendors and try a new one.

Trade Shows and Seminars:

Communities and Associations of wholesalers, retailers regularly organizes trade shows and exhibitions for a prospective partnership. Such exhibitions can be cashed in for enriching our industrial connections and finding potential vendors best suited for our products or services.

Google knows everything:

The cheapest, fastest way of contacting new vendors is to just type on your search engine “efficient vendors for software” and Google will give you two lac thirty thousand three forty three results in 1.76 seconds. But relying merely on Google is not advisable plainly because Google, like us, is also a business and looks for its best interests rather than ours. It might show an unfit vendor in the first page solely because that particular vendor paid higher bid amount.

Online Marketplaces:

These are the most reliable and efficient way to find vendors. Online marketplaces has emerged and evolved to better cater needs of their clients. Marketplaces like AskMe LLC analyze your business and it’s objective needs and finds a vendor which perfectly caters to these needs. This eliminates a lot of unfit and unwanted vendors and can help business focus on its core competencies by taking care of the rest.

Industry groups & community:

Communities and industrial groups run on the principle of mutual exchange of obligations. A professional fee won’t play much role in here. These communities have been established to help each other serve their target audience in a peaceful manner.

Trade Publications:

Forbes and Time aren’t the only magazines, budding businesses should subscribe to. To reach in Forbes, one needs to first subscribe to trade publications of their particular industry as a tool of research for new suppliers and vendors.

Check the competitor’s vendors:

Sometimes the best way to defeat the competition is to do exactly what it does, but alter it in a way that it benefits us better. If you find a vendor who is helping your competitor access and connect with your audience, you should approach those vendors too, as they clearly know what they are doing. Although, this way could have legal and ethical repercussions and you might end up with the competitors’ supplier paying higher price than the competitor himself.

Low cost vendors:

If you are primarily looking at cost cutting and profits, a cheapest source of distribution may be the best alternative for your goals. All you need to do is select the first vendor that quotes the lowest price. But this again could be hazardous if your market share declines with your cost cutting solutions.

The prestigious vendors:

There are long established suppliers and vendors who can guarantee you the perfect product placement for your offering with optimized reach and connectivity. They already have a visible reputation in market in terms of logistics, payment, delivery as well as services. They are already known in the market and that’s why you do not need any sources to look for them Only pitfall with this way, is that since we are partnering with a prestigious vendor, his/her bargaining power over us would be much higher than ours.

Online Forums:

India Food Forum is an acclaimed forum for discovering suppliers, distributors and retailers in India in Food Market. A business can simply ask for suitable vendors, and the users will refer to the one who is perfect fit. This, kind of, acts like LinkedIn for B2B purposes.

Pull off your Networks:

Lastly, you can pull all the strings that you’ve attached so far in your personal and professional life to get a suitable vendor. Although it would test how strong your network is, the outcome would not reliable. You may end up forming a poor business tie-up who would only ensure a good relationship, rather than a good partnership.

There is of course no right way out of the twelve. The process of selecting a vendor is rather shades of grey as you need to discover each source of vendors and form different partnerships from different sources. Except for an online marketplace, rest all the options ask businesses to shift their focus from day to day business activities, to first finding a perfect vendor. Only an established marketplace assures to do all the work for you.

Finding a best match, might a difficult and even tedious process, but once you find them, they will take you everywhere you want to be.

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